Bulldogs Ready to Open Season

Sep 17, 2009

Compete
Saturday at Van Cortlandt Park and Quinnipiac

NEW
HAVEN, Conn. – The Yale men’s cross country
team will compete for this first time of the season this Saturday
in two different invitationals: at the 15th Annual Br.
John “Paddy” Doyle/ Iona College Meet of Champions at
Van Cortlandt Park in New York City, and at the Quinnipiac
Invitational in Hamden, Conn. These meets will give the team a
chance to see what all of its members can achieve this year.

As head coach
Daniel Ireland acknowledged, the team is undergoing a transition.

“We
graduated three of our top four runners this year,” said
Ireland. “Jake Gallagher in particular will be tough to
replace.” This is Ireland’s 10th season in charge of
the Yale program, and it will be interesting to see who ends up
leading the Bulldogs’ pack.

The team will
rely on leadership from senior captain Chris
Labosky, who was named to the CoSIDA/ESPN the Magazine
Academic All-American men’s track and field/cross country
third team this summer. Labosky is capable of running sub-25:00 at
Van Cortlandt Park, and was the consistent second runner for Yale
his sophomore year.

Fellow senior
Jeff Perrella, who transferred to Yale last year
from the College of William and Mary, contributed greatly to the
team in his first year as a Bulldog, finishing amongst Yale’s
top five at the Heptagonal Championship and NCAA Regionals.
Perrella will probably be the fastest Eli at many of the races this
fall.

One of the other
seniors on the team with potential to perform well is Kevin
Brown, who has been a strong distance runner on the track
team during his years at Yale, but has never competed during the
cross country season. Brown, whose personal record for the mile is
4:11.44, should be able to compete well in the longer distances of
the fall. Seniors Max Brown and Alex
Harris could also end up being a great help to the
Bulldogs.

Sophomores and
juniors will make up most of Yale’s top-10 pack. Junior
Max Walden is definitely one of those runners; he
finished in Yale’s top five at both Northeast Regionals and
the IC4A Championships at the end of last season. Other juniors
with potential include Matt Bogdan, Chris
Scavone and James Wyper.

Sophomore
Julian Sheinbaum will likely be one of the
consistent top-five runners this year. Last year he was the third
Eli finisher in the first meet of the year. Other strong sophomores
include Jake McKenzie and Nathan
Richards, both of whom performed well at the IC4A
Championships in 2008, as well as Conor Dooney and
Sam Lynch, who is new to the team.

Coach Ireland
said of the young team: “Because we had these great seniors
last year, a lot of these guys haven’t been battle tested.
They didn’t have the chance to be in the top five because
there were people ahead of them, and they didn’t have the
pressure driving them to be top guy. A lot of these sophomores and
juniors are very talented, so we’ll see.”

Many of the
freshmen have the potential to perform well this season, too. The
Bulldogs added five members of the class of 2013 to the squad:
Demetri Goutos (Sarasota Springs, N.Y.),
Sammy Kirtner (Eugene, Ore.), Kevin
Lunn (Santa Barbard, Calif.), Michael
Pierce (Richboro, Pa.) and Matt Thwaites
(Burlington, Vt.).

Twelve of the
Bulldogs will travel to the famed Van Cortlandt Park this weekend,
where they will run the 8k course at the Iona Meet of Champions.
The team has not competed in this particular race before, but the
Bulldogs did compete at Van Cortlandt three times last season.

As Ireland
pointed out, however, because of the runners who dominated
Yale’s team for the past two years, “a lot of these
guys haven’t seen the course. It’ll be good for them,
because it’s the same place that the Heptagonal Championships
will be, and the same number of people are allowed to race."

Among the 23
teams competing at the meet are Ivy League rivals Harvard and Penn,
as well as the host school Iona College, which won the NCAA
Northeast Regional Championships in 2008.

Several of the
other Bulldogs will be staying in the area and going to Quinnipiac
University to compete against nine other schools from the Northeast
Conference of Division I (Yale is in the Ivy Group according to the
NCAA). The men start at 12:30 p.m. Results will be posted at PlattSystems.com as
well as at YaleBulldogs.com.